Strategy

Corporate Strategy Consulting

Exploit your company's key strengths.

A company’s strategy is at the satnav of its business. It directs where the organisation is heading and how it is going to get there. A good corporate strategy exploits a company’s key strengths.

We with leaders on defining vision, purpose and values, the development of strategic business plans and the implementation of roadmaps.

We help organisations when they are facing difficult times and unsure how to amend strategies to drive business growth. Under the sheer deluge of change, strategies must be continually refreshed, if not completely re-thought.

But how to engage people in making growth strategies a success? Corporate strategies for growth can be as dry as dust and confined to the board. Companies should describe them simply and involve everyone in delivering them.

The key issue for leadership teams is to refresh their thinking in ways that are valuable to all stakeholders in the business. This means being strategically and tactically on-trend – and on the money.

Our Approach

How we ensure the successful delivery of your strategy.

We work with you to ensure your strategy:

Engages the leadership team deeply
Interrogates the current organisational strategy
Develops organisational thinking in the context of macro trends driving or affecting the wider context or marketplace
Explores strategic possibilities for the organisation through the lens of best practice by direct competitors and other relevant organisations
Builds evolutionary and revolutionary strategic models
Combines new and existing thinking to enable a ‘best of both’ strategy
Measures impact and effectiveness
Facilitates improvements to the model

We interview individual members of the leadership team to understand personal and team thinking about current and future organisational strategy.

We use our knowledge and business experience to identify strategies that apply to your organisation and stakeholders.

We run workshops to challenge current thinking, develop new models, build action plans and, once the strategy is implemented, we help to solve problems that may arise.

Ensuring the successful delivery of strategy is paramount.

Three Related Services

How we can make you stand out from the competition.

Cultural Change

The best definition of organisational culture is ‘the way things get done around here.’

The way an organisation gets things done depends on:

What it believes in and aims for
Whether its internal stakeholders believe in them too
If external stakeholders recognise their value

Organisations have big problems when gaps open between any or all of these three.

Our approach involves interviews with stakeholders to determine the organisation’s vision, beliefs, goals and practices and we diagnose ways in which an organisation is failing to deliver or live up to these expectations.

Brand and Category Strategy

To paraphrase JFK: ask not what your category can do for your brand – ask what your brand can do for your category. The days of brands planning their futures in splendid isolation, or as simple wargames against their closest competitor, are over.

Brands exist to grow categories. Consequently, brand and category strategy must be thought through as two mutually supportive halves of a single whole, like the hemispheres of the brain.

Insight and Targeting

When we launched in 1996, we waged war on the then-prevalent idea of the target consumer as a kind of mindless happy eater hooked on the line of a brand’s promise.

Now the focus is engaging people holistically, which changes this consumer model completely. “You get less of a rational calculating machine,” Rory Sutherland argues, “than a kind of anxious, moralizing, herd-like, reciprocating, image-conscious, story-telling game theorist.” The key to targeting is deeper insight: having multifaceted ideas that will stick like velcro to much more complicated, speeded-up and interconnected real lives.